Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6) Read online

  The now-familiar quad appeared, with the front three as before but the knight in armour clearly in the grip of powerful emotion. There weren’t words, but the whoaaarrr noise was eloquent, as were the gestures. There was no doubt whatsoever that Tom really really fancied Silvie.

  Silvie herself sat swinging her feet and grinning until the uproar had subsided, and Tom himself raised a scarlet face, trying to laugh but clearly very embarrassed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Silvie assured him. ‘It’s fine, completely natural, an involuntary physical response typical of a healthy young alpha male. And I am, believe me, very used to that. Quarians fancy people too, of course, only with us it’s far more of a mutual attraction between personalities, very difficult for us to understand the idea of one person fancying another when it isn’t reciprocal. And dear lord, guys…’ she shook her head. ‘You’re obsessed. And just because you repress that aboard ship doesn’t stop you thinking about it. In fact, for the first couple of weeks out of port most of you seem to think about hardly anything else. Which is fine, it is who you are. Just don’t get any ideas in that line about quarians – no quarian is going to bond with you that way, however gorgeous and irresistible you might think you are, you’re all too loud, too bonkers and emotionally messed up to be any kind of attractive to quarians in the romantic sense. I’ve learned to ignore it, myself – which wasn’t easy either. I really did think that I was being helpful when I used to comment on people’s feelings for one another, and unexpressed, powerful emotions are really uncomfortable to be around, too. You can help with that at Quarus by keeping as calm as you can. There are a range of breathing exercises and visualisations you can try in the pack – and yes,’ she flicked a grin at Rangi Tekawa, ‘that does include the tree. That made no sense to me at all when I first came aboard but I soon learned to appreciate it. And it works – I was lucky enough to catch someone doing it this morning, and it is a great example.’

  She put footage up on the screen, again, played as the camera had caught it, first time. It was the computer room, focussed on a leading star who was casting a glance at the back of a petty officer. It was apparent that the leading star was a little irritated, and the rigid back of the petty officer indicated that he was annoyed, too. Then the leading star took a deep breath, shook his shoulders slightly and gave a quick, wry smile before resuming work on a programming panel.

  ‘It was trivial,’ Silvie said, ‘the kind of shakedown thing I’ve found is normal for humans as they learn to get along together. But you will understand, I think, why this sort of thing used to worry me when I first came to the League, when you see it as I do.’

  The replay was shocking. In it, the leading star snarled aggressively and even without words it was apparent that he was uttering obscenities. Flickering images of pigs and filth and fists were in his mind as he glared at the petty officer’s retreating back, while for his part the petty officer was buzzing with self-righteous indignation and mentally slapping the other man on the back of his head.

  ‘When I first came,’ Silvie said, pausing the replay, ‘I would have rushed to intervene, asking what was wrong and doing my best to help resolve what looks to me like a violent emotional conflict. But I’ve learned – and just look what happens.’

  The leading star drew breath, and his mental imagery shimmered into that of drawing himself in to a strong but pliable tree, branches gently free, feet firmly rooted. Then he shrugged, smiled and settled back to work.

  ‘When I saw them a couple of minutes later, they were both fine,’ Silvie said. ‘Which I used to think was mad, until I realised that humans have a kind of self-calibrating system, calming and centering themselves when they realise that their emotions are harmful. In this case, clearly, the need to form a good working relationship was far more important than whatever niggle had upset them, and the niggle could even have been part of forming that relationship, establishing boundaries. And since the curiosity in the room is now extreme, I will ask them – guys, what was the niggle?’

  ‘It was my fault,’ the leading star spoke up bravely. ‘It was Mr Genler’s first watch in the computer room and I thought I was being helpful bringing him up to speed on how we do things on the Heron. When he slapped me down – and you’re right, it did feel like that – I did have a mutter and a swear about it, thinking he was being… well, bossy and high handed, rejecting the help I’d been trying to give him. I realised later that it was me being a dipstick, he already knew everything I’d been telling him and he must have thought I was a right know-all.’

  ‘I did,’ the petty officer admitted, as attention turned to him. ‘But I should have handled it better. Sorry I snapped.’

  The two of them looked sheepishly at one another and Silvie chuckled.

  ‘Oh, go and have a hug,’ she told them. They didn’t quite do that, but they did get up, make their way across the theatre and shake hands, to general approval. ‘There, you see,’ Silvie observed. ‘Humans. Your emotions and your relationships are so volatile, even best friends fall out, even partners fall out, which is inconceivable to quarians. But it helps, it really does, that you can recognise when your emotions are harmful and pull it back. Find the inner tree, so to speak. You’ll find exercises in the pack showing you what different emotions look like – just normal, everyday feelings that you don’t even think much about, yourselves. But I will just mention, here, physical discomfort…’

  She put up an image of a member of the crew at work that morning, apparently fine but to Silvie’s eye, urgently needing to pee. The anguished pee-pee dance was so obvious that everyone laughed, and then broke into even noisier mirth as she put up an image of Tom Holland from that morning. His face was screwed up and scarlet like that of a baby straining to fill a nappy. The next image was evidently from the base, at a social event. The woman who was talking to Silvie appeared to be chatting normally but behind her was a vision of suffering, shifting from foot to foot with winces, moans and whimpers. ‘Badly fitting shoes,’ Silvie explained. ‘Just remember, if you are uncomfortable you’re making us uncomfortable too, so the considerate thing is to do something about it. Learning not to say anything about that kind of situation was really tough for me – as hard for me as it would be for you to ignore a child crying when they’d fallen over. You instinctively go to help and comfort them, yes? Well it’s the same with us, when we see someone in physical or emotional distress, we consider it to be the good, decent, moral and responsible action to help them. It took me quite a while to learn that commenting on people’s need to go poo was more upsetting for them than the physical discomfort, and I don’t think that’s something my people will readily accept. I had to learn to act in what for me is a cruel and immoral way in order to fit in with your customs, so I don’t think there’ll be a widespread take-up on that one.’

  She smiled, and it was clear that the lecture was moving on. ‘Which brings me,’ she continued, ‘to the key point of this lecture, why I poke people. Everything you’ve seen so far is normal, healthy everyday interaction on this ship, in which it has to be said that all of you are significantly more open minded, adventurous and cosmopolitan than the average human being. You can feel a bit smug about that if you like, it’s one of the things that makes the Fourth so special. But even you guys can be extraordinarily loud, and you can get yourselves into a right tangle, too – don’t even get me started on the human ability to feel more than one emotion at once, that’s far more advanced than this lecture has scope for. But you do get yourselves into emotional tangles, as even you must be aware of that muddled conflicted angst of not knowing quite how you feel. And then, you know, there are the really nasty ones – unpleasant people with nasty ideas, truly dysfunctional, messed up, aggressive, sadistic or walking on the dark side of human nature. There are no people like that on this ship, because the skipper asked me to make sure we weren’t taking anyone hiding that kind of issue. In fact they’d already done a very good job i
n the screening and selection process – and just to be clear, the two guys who dropped out of the crew pre-boarding aren’t like that either, they were just too shy to cope with this kind of exposure. But I do meet people like that, I meet them all the time at events where I’m being introduced to members of the public – groundsiders, mostly, at diplomatic hospitality events. Never been to an Embassy do yet without being introduced to at least one person who made me feel sick. And that, too, is something I’ve had to learn to deal with. Mostly, I do that by a visualisation technique which encloses them in a cocoon and implodes them. If even that isn’t working, the poke.’ She demonstrated.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Why do I poke people? This is why. One – too loud.’

  The image was of Alex laughing. The volume was deafening, a cacophony of guffaws, hoots, giggles and merriment accompanied by a gushingly affectionate awwwwww! which would in itself have been ear-splitting. As people winced and gasped and clapped hands over their ears, Silvie poked towards the screen with an emphatic oi and the noise switched down as if by magic to a bearable chuckle and fond apologetic noise.

  ‘Two,’ said Silvie, ‘tangled.’

  The second image that came up was a head-spinning chaos of half-seen emotions – fear, anger, doubt, resolve, self-pity, too much and too fast to be really sure about anything but none of it happy. The noises that came with it were horrible nerve-jangling discords at a volume that made many people shudder with skin-crawling discomfort. Again, Silvie poked at the screen and the distressing stridency stopped immediately, resolved at once into a startled huh?

  ‘And three,’ said Silvie, ‘nasty.’

  There were exclamations of horror at the images which exploded out of the screen – hatred, loathing, revulsion, images of Silvie herself as a sub-human monster.

  ‘Hey,’ said Silvie, and poked at the image, stopping it with a moment of shock which then transformed into fear – jagged and uncomfortable but nothing as bad as the hate and contempt that had been there before. ‘I’ve used a clipart CGI for that one, because Shion said I should protect the privacy of the person concerned. I don’t see why I should, myself, when they came at me with such terrible feelings knowing that I would be sensitive to them and that it would hurt me, wanting to hurt me. That’s assault, if you ask me, and the fact that your laws don’t recognise it as such only adds insult to injury. So when I say that I poked someone in self- defence, that’s why.’ She looked at them in surprise as waves of shame and anxiety poured out of them at the realisation that people, their people, had done that to Silvie. It was as if they were all trying to give her a hug and say sorry, all at once. ‘Stop that,’ Silvie scolded, and laughed. ‘I was created to do this,’ she reminded them, ‘to come here and learn about you. It isn’t always easy and there is the odd one who makes me want to throw up, but I do find you endlessly fascinating and it’s usually a lot of fun, too, especially aboard ship. I love the way your minds all swing into synch when you’re working as a team – it can be almost quarian at times, that wordless understanding, trust and consensus. And I do love playing with you, too, you are great fun and you never take offence. So I’d just like to explain what is going on when I say something that startles you and then fall about laughing – some of you know that I call that a gnnnnh moment. This will give you some idea.’

  She put an image on the screen – it was of the command deck, quite busy but nothing unusual going on. When she overlaid the quadruple images, though, it was clear that there was a mighty emotional babble going on – too much all at once even to be able to begin to take it in, just noise, a tumult of images and deafening noise.

  Then, all at once, all of it stopped. Every head turned towards the camera and every face showed stunned incredulity. There was a half-second of absolute silence. Then in the next moment they all turned into cartoons whose jaws hit the deck in comical unison with a resounding guhnuhnuhnuhnuh.

  ‘There, see? Who could resist?’ Silvie said, as they all burst out laughing. ‘So – finally,’ she got up from the desk and beamed brightly at them. ‘I’ll demonstrate that quarians have no nudity taboo…’

  She put her hands to the collar of her shipboard rig and made as if to strip out of it, then stopped and just howled with glee, laughing so hilariously that she was completely incapable of speech. Behind her on the screen appeared one word… Gotcha!

  The laughter and the standing ovation went on for several minutes, till Alex himself got up on the stage and calmed things down, more for Silvie’s sake than anything as she was in some danger of laughing herself sick.

  ‘Thank you, Silvie.’ He gave her a hand to sit back on the desk and passed her a tissue, as tears of mirth were rolling down her cheeks. ‘And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’ As everyone sat down at that and quietened down quickly, he gave a smile. ‘I am sure,’ he said, ‘that you all have a thousand questions you would love to ask, but I have to ask you to be considerate about that, both now and when you’re meeting Silvie around the ship. She will talk to us about things as and when she feels like it and we will not pester her. On the contrary, I hope we all have a better understanding now of our impact on her and we will all do our best to ensure that she is happy and comfortable – yes?’

  There was an immediate chorus of affirmation, and Silvie pulled herself together, wiping her eyes and commenting, ‘Oh, that was lovely – just love it when you all do that ‘in this together’ thing. And thank you, but you don’t need to worry about me, I’m just fine. And I will take one question, or Ali may spontaneously combust … what is it, Ali?’

  Ali Jezno started to apologise and to say that he really didn’t want to be a nuisance, then as Silvie quirked an eyebrow at him he remembered what she’d said about being honest and changed tack. ‘It’s just that you’re always telling Davie to shut up,’ he said. ‘And it obviously gets on your nerves being around him, which is odd, you know, because I thought he was engineered to be an ambassador to your people just as you were to be an ambassador to us, so I’d have thought that you’d get along brilliantly. And I guess I’ve always wondered why you don’t.’

  ‘Good question,’ said Silvie. ‘And the simple answer is that he was engineered without the empath gene. He wasn’t designed, you see, just to be an ambassador to us, but to step up and help your people as other species make first contact with you. That is going to happen a lot more frequently now that you’ve stopped hitting one another with swords – which to most civilisations out there is something that only happened about ten minutes ago, even though it seems like ancient history to you. Now the Gider are giving you the good word, too, you should expect more approaches, I’d have said possibly quite soon if it wasn’t for the thing with the Solarans. Anyway, Davie’s father understood that you’re moving into that phase of increasing contact and he wanted someone able to represent you at that level of intellect and ability. But he didn’t want the empath gene, he felt that it would mess Davie up in living with humans and I’d have to agree, it would have been horrible for him growing up like that. Me, I came here when I was ready. My people, it has to be said, weren’t entirely happy with Davie’s design – engineering a child without the empath gene is as weird to them as designing one blind. But they understood that it was important for humanity so they went ahead and created the embryo. So there it is, Davie is not an empath and I am. And his energy levels, pow, off the scale, he’s a lightning storm even when he’s resting and when he’s really energetic or excited just being around him makes me feel like I’m being beaten up. Would you like to see what it is like for me?’ She glanced around the theatre. ‘I warn you, it’s an overload.’ Seeing their response, she grinned. ‘Okay – just give me a moment.’ She was working on her comp as she spoke. ‘I’ll set it,’ she told them, ‘so when it gets too much for you, you can do the same as I do and tell him to shut up. Just a firm command, shut up, and you’ll see how he reacts to that, too. So – if you’re ready… T-minus three, two, one…’

  ‘Shut up! O
h my God, shut up!’ People everywhere were clapping hands over their ears and screwing their eyes shut, and even then the noise was vibrating through their breast-bones like the bass at a concert. It was physically shaking, with blinding strobe lights and an ear-blasting clamour of voices, all of them Davie’s but impossible to make out what he was saying.

  Then, as the yells of ‘shut up!’ took effect, all that furore died away and left just one bright light, dazzling to look into but bearable, and one voice speaking.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What he’s done there,’ Silvie explained, ‘is literally to shut up, to shut down, putting all but one of his cognitive threads into a meditative state and focusing all his attention on one thing. When you see it at my speed it’s like one of those boxes that folds in and in upon itself, the structure collapses and he pulls it all in to one thread, one voice. And he makes that one as quiet as he can, an emotional whisper. My people are going to love him – he’ll be like a rock star there, you’ll see.’ She grinned. ‘He is quite astonishingly beautiful, you know. I could sit and stare at him all day, from a safe distance. Unfortunately for me, that’s about twelve decks away and there are only eight decks on this ship.’ She chuckled. ‘But I only find him so overwhelming because there’s only one of me – quarians resonate with one another in much the same way as superlight cores, we’re very much stronger together, stabilise one another, so a group of, say, ten or more quarians will be able to look at Davie in all his glory and not be at all overloaded by it. I’m looking forward to that, and to being finally able to have fun with my cousin without ending up with a headache. But don’t be surprised, when we get there, if masses of my people are following him around. He is glorious, a charismatic supernova. And I didn’t, since you’re wondering, choose him to be the ambassador because for one, I have to work closely with the ambassador before we get there and you’ve just seen how well that would work if it was Davie, and for two, Davie and the skipper work brilliantly as a team and in that, no question, the skipper is in charge.’